


Such A Strange Vibration

by Laine



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1970s, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 15:05:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laine/pseuds/Laine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summers in San Francisco belong to the breeze.</p><p>July 1970: Sansa Stark lives among the hippies and bohemians in Haight-Ashbury, but she spends secret afternoons at the VA, talking to the veterans newly-returned from the Vietnam War.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Such A Strange Vibration

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story comes from "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Flowers In Your Hair)" by Scott McKenzie.

Summers in San Francisco belong to the breeze.  It pushes a current through the streets, spreading scents of patchouli, of incense, of ideas and dreams strewn as wildly and carelessly as confetti on New Year’s Eve.  The crispness comes without warning; a single breath of cold air will interrupt a still and mild afternoon, and you suddenly long for a sweater or a scarf or a pair of fuzzy socks or a hot cup of tea.  It sets the spine on edge and electrifies the little hairs on your forearms, the nape of your neck.  Killing season, she thinks morbidly, her imagination sending her across the sea to where the boys are dying on riverbanks and festering in thick jungles, too dense and remote for their screams to be heard.  

 

The Kent State shootings haunted her dreams, even now, two months after the fact.  Senseless violence, both within and without- speaking for the dead kids overseas ended with dead kids right here at home.  Sansa bought Neil Young’s “Ohio” single as soon as she could, and she nearly wore out her record player, listening to the song over and over, Neil’s high, reedy, unsettling voice crying the lament:

 

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming

We’re finally on our own

This summer I hear the drumming

Four dead in Ohio...

 

She knows she isn’t alone; most of the country seems shaken by the events.  But here in the Haight, people tend to deal with the harshness of reality by muting it and muffling it, pulling the shades down behind their eyes, even as their lips shape empty words of indignation, toothless pleas for peace.

 

Sansa considers doing the same from time to time.  She could easily get her hands on some hashish or mushrooms or blotter acid; Petyr offers it all the time, asking nothing in return but a smile.  Petyr, the dime-store Timothy Leary in his narrow house on Ashbury, urging the long-haired disciples who cluster on his stoop to turn on, tune in, drop out (but always with a sharpness in his eye, like a magpie who’s spotted a glint of jewelry).  Sometimes, oblivion seems such a delicious idea.  But her fear, that girlish, stupid, humiliating fear, stops her every time.

 

But aside from the drug haze and the opportunists who disguise themselves as kindred souls, Sansa rather likes San Francisco.  She fills her days browsing the outdoor markets in the Castro, rifling through bins of records, perching on benches and stoops with her tiny mandolin guitar and strumming Joni Mitchell until passersby toss a nickel here and a dime there into her instrument case.  It’s almost enough to keep her thoughts from wandering back east, back home...almost, but not quite.

 

A piece of her still hooks into those memories, the father and brothers overseas, the military burials and breathless waiting by the phone, the thin envelopes from the US Army Corps bearing news to bring the world tumbling down.  And it’s this piece that urges her to leave her guitar at home a few days a week, to brush out her wild curls and put on a classic skirt and blouse, to shine her scuffed Mary Janes and walk her way down to the VA Center.  

 

She isn’t really sure what she’s there to do, truth be told.  She has no training as a nurse, she’s not with the convent mission that sometimes sends its sisters to pray with the former soldiers.  “You can just sit with them...talk about anything, you know?” the distracted woman at the front desk had told her before rushing off with her clipboard and no further instructions.  

 

And so she plunges forth into the unknown.  Some of the soldiers have no interest in talking, not to her and not to anyone else.  They sit in stony silence until they can file their paperwork and vanish through the doors, week after week after week.  And then there are the ones who want to tell her everything, repeating stories again and again, hungry for her nods and brief, uncertain replies.  They want to throw their words into the air and have them caught by a human being- they’re tired of the ricochet, the fruitless bouncing off of empty walls.  

 

Every once in awhile, there will be a man who can’t keep to his side of the line.  He’ll leer at her the second she sits beside him, his eyes raking over her body, tearing at the seams of her clothes with every back and forth, up and down.  She tells herself that it’s nothing more than fantasy, that it’s a small price to pay...but then there’s a hand on her knee, fingers inching up into the crease of her inner thigh, and she leaps from the chair and pivots on her heel, heart thumping and cheeks burning.

 

“You all right?” a voice calls from the room across the hall.  

 

The redness of her face only deepens when she recognizes the speaker as Mister Mystery Date.  That’s his name in her head; she used to play that silly board game all the time during her babysitting days, and her favorite was always the blonde one who looked like a Ken doll.  

 

But the guy from the Mystery Date card never had such furrows in his brow or a sharpness in his smile.  And, of course, he had both his hands.

 

“I’m fine,” she says, immediately hating the breathy and light timbre of her voice.  He nods in response, his green eyes focused in her direction...but not looking at her, not really.

 

“Do you mind if I sit down?”  She points to the empty folding chair across the table from him, and he shrugs his shoulders.

 

“Sure, if you want.”

 

The metal chair clangs against the linoleum as she pulls it out and takes a seat.  

 

There’s a fan in the window; it hums at a low frequency, underscoring the quiet.  

 

“I’m Sansa,” she blurts abruptly, holding out her right hand.

 

(She’s surprised by her own honesty- she’s had so many names lately.   Sometimes “Alayne”, sometimes “Birdie”...they called her “Janis” on Haight Street for a while, after she dyed her hair black that one time.  She hasn’t been “Sansa” in so very long.)

 

He looks at her outstretched hand, and his lips curl into an expression halfway between a sneer and a smile.  After a moment or two, he takes her right hand in his left- it’s an awkward, wrong-sided shake, and she feels a heavy stone of shame lodge itself into her stomach- and shakes it slowly- once, twice, three times.

 

“My name is Jaime.”

 

He doesn’t say anything after that, just picks up the clicker he’d had in his left hand and starts his exercises.  The clicks come with every squeeze, and Sansa feels oddly soothed and lulled by the sound, as sure and precise as a rhythm section.  She lets her breathing sync up with the clicks, and as she watches him- the hair swishing with every whir of the fan, the little tic in the jaw- she feels quite content to forget about time altogether.

 

.

 

She visits the VA more often than usual these days.  There are a few men she goes to see- Dontos, always smelling of cheap whiskey and ready with a story; Sandor, cultivating his fury like a greenhouse flower, oddly gentle and insightful in spite of his spiny outer layer.   But always, she goes on days when she knows she’ll see Jaime.

 

He talks to her now; it took a while, several days of semi-amiable silence.  But now he tells her about his life before Vietnam- he spins rich and colorful stories of life in a Beverly Hills mansion, driving the Sunset Strip in his Alfa Romeo with the top down, checking out concerts at the Whisky A Go Go and going up to the Hollywood sign to watch the sun rise.  Sansa has never been to Los Angeles, but she can picture it so clearly now, these beautiful images scrolling through her brain as a song by The Doors echoes in her ears.  And Jaime, the quintessential California boy, at the center of it all...

 

He hates the VA- he goes because that’s what they told him to do, but he doesn’t need the pension, and he tells her one day that he’s not going to spend time there anymore.  The words form a fist around her heart, squeezing tighter and tighter- he’s magic, his stories are color and fire and beauty, and if he goes away...

 

She must look as crestfallen as she feels, for he smiles that sideways grin of his before passing her a slip of paper with an address written in his uneven scrawl.

 

“That’s where I live.  Come and visit sometime, if you want.”  And then, with a wink: “Maybe dressed in something that doesn’t make you look like a drawing from a Dick and Jane book, yeah?”

  
  


.

  
  


Jaime lives in a cheerful and sunny top-floor apartment in Mission Dolores.  It’s actually owned by his friend Brienne, who he met in Vietnam; she served as a WAC for a year and a half before getting honorably discharged right after Jaime.  Sansa likes her honest face, her sparkling blue eyes and warm smile.  She doesn’t say much, preferring to save her words for when they’re truly needed, and Sansa likes that, too.

 

She’ll spend afternoons sitting with Jaime and Brienne in the kitchen, sipping strong Earl Grey from a chipped tea cup that Brienne inherited from her long-dead mother.  The two roommates are easy together, and Sansa finds herself wondering whether they’re lovers as well as friends.  Not that it matters, she reminds herself for the hundredth time, accepting Brienne’s offer of another cup of tea.

 

When Brienne isn’t around, Jaime tells her more stories.  They’ve taken a fascinating turn; he’ll still talk about L.A., his adventures in the valleys and the hills.  But there’s a second protagonist to the tales, a partner in crime, a mirror, a shadow, another part of him.  

 

He shows her the picture one late afternoon, just as the sun begins to set.  He’s shirtless on the beach, hair windswept, smile wide, wider than she’s ever seen it before.  His right arm, the one that now ends with a blank space, is carelessly slung around the waist of a woman in a bikini.  And this woman...Sansa has always been a lover of film, and she used to idolize the glamorous actresses of the Golden Age: Garbo, Bergman, both of the Hepburns.  But none of these screen goddesses, not a single one, can compare with the fierce, raw, gold-and-green beauty of Cersei Lannister.

 

She weaves through his stories like the most exquisite thread in a tapestry.  Bold, clever, hotheaded, sensual...she’s all these things, and much, much more.  And yet Jaime always speaks of his sister in the past tense- she’s too perfect to last, Sansa thinks, certain that such beauty can be nothing but ephemeral.

 

Only once does she try to ask Jaime where Cersei is now.  And the flash of his eyes, glaring with the narrow brightness of daggers, tells her never to ask again.

 

She takes to bringing her mandolin along with her.  He humors her as she sings her favorites, her precious Joni and Joan and Janis.  He tells her that her voice is pretty, and he seems appropriately moved when she nervously plucks out the chords to “Ohio”.  

 

One day, she plays a Crosby, Stills and Nash song, one that she’s wanted to play for him ever since he first told her of his exquisite twin:

 

Guinnevere had green eyes

Like yours, mi'lady, like yours

When she'd walk down through the garden

In the morning after it rained...

 

When she’s finished, she looks up; a pair of crystalline tears spill down Jaime’s cheeks, and she knows it’s done, she’s gone, she’s his.

 

He makes love to her in the twilight.  The windows of his bedroom are open, and she catches a whiff of dahlias.  His beard scratches the tender skin of her neck, his tongue tracing the freckles on her throat- she sifts her fingers through his hair and smoothes her palms over the defined muscles beneath his golden skin.  The arm without a hand hangs useless at his side, but the other hand is everywhere, plucking at her nipples like violin strings before vanishing between her legs.

 

She turns her head to the side; the framed photo sits on his bedside table, he and Cersei standing in the surf, their bodies fitting together like puzzle pieces, green on green, gold on gold.  

 

He thrusts into her, and she thinks for a moment that Cersei’s eyes flicker in the photograph.  But it’s just a trick of the light.

 

She feels him trembling as his movements become quicker, more erratic.  There are goosepimples on his arms and the nape of his neck, and he bites her lip when he kisses her.  

 

He says nothing when he comes, just sighs into her mouth, his breath warm as the breeze wafting in through the window.  

 

They part, and he flops on his back and stares up at the ceiling.  Sansa can hear nothing but her pounding heart, until he whispers, almost too quiet (but not quiet enough in the end):

 

“Cersei.”

 

Then there’s that wind, that cold San Francisco wind, with the bite that nips you with no warning, no care at all.

 

.

 

She hastens away from Mission Dolores beneath a starless sky.  Licks of sound come from every direction- a girl playing a tambourine, a snatch of a Bob Dylan record, the hushed bustle of a drug deal.  Sansa pulls her crocheted shawl tight around her shoulders, but it doesn’t matter; the chill lingers no matter what.  

 

When she arrives at her destination, she steps over a few blotto hippies and raps her knuckles on the door with some urgency.  Petyr answers in a caftan and loose Indian pants, a few strands of love beads around his neck- a sharp contrast to his well-trimmed hair and groomed mustache.  

 

“What can I do for you, Alayne?”

 

She doesn’t say anything, but he reads her eyes- it’s his talent, his great gift.  With a smile, he takes her shoulders and guides her inside.  

 

He places the blotter acid on her tongue with the solemnity of a priest offering communion.  She closes her eyes and gives herself over- the sickness in her stomach, the aching in her head, the loss and guilt and confusion...it all falls away, replaced by nothing but colors: the dusty shade of the Hollywood Hills, the blue of the water off the Santa Monica Pier, the red of the western sunset.

 

But mostly, she sees the gold and the green.  

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
